"People have come in here crying," says co-owner Barbara Tom. "It's been hard to talk to some of our longtime customers. People are taking it very personally."

Tom says the decision to close the mystery bookstore after 30 years was difficult but something she and her partner, Carolyn Lane, had considered a few times in recent years.

"The last 12 years or so have been up and down," Tom says. "We almost closed several times. We're not losing money, but we're breaking even, and that's only because Carolyn and I haven't been taking much of a (salary)."

Murder By the Book has been a fixture on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard for almost 30 years, first at a location where Pastaworks and at its present location at 3210 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd. since 1988. Word spread up and down the boulevard on Tuesday morning and rippled through the writing community in Portland and the wider world of mystery and thriller writers. Tom says she's heard from Lawrence Block and from Craig Johnson, whose recent appearances at the store were big draws, and she singled out Bill Cameron, Dana Haynes and Johnny Shaw among the many local mystery writers who've supported the store.

The reasons for Murder By the Book's likely demise are no mystery. Tom says there are fewer of the loyal customers who went out of their way to sustain the store by going out of their way to visit and pay full price for books they could get cheaper elsewhere.

"Attrition," she says. "Every year we'd notice there weren't quite as many of them."

And then there's technology.

"Sales in January have been incredibly slow," Tom says. "Every Christmas people get Kindles and Nooks and want to fill them up. We'd have to save for January in June. I'm not against technology, at all, but we just reached a tipping point. You can't sustain a ship that's leaking, however slowly. I think something's going to rise up that will work, and it will be some combination of print and digital, but we couldn't wait for it. And you have to be able to make money off it. This is a business."